Oh, the precision Mercury. The Mercury that carves out a piece of you like a switchblade, inspects it, and can put it back so carefully that you’d never know you were peaked at if you didn’t feel the pain.

This is Mercury in Virgo—Mercury the dissector. This is the Mercury that always sees more than it lets you know.

This is domicile and exalted Mercury without triplicity rulership. It’s a Mercury works oh so well. It’s a Mercury that works inside the head. It’s not always a social Mercury. No, Mercury in Virgo is often polarizing. It cuts consensus open to see what the stuff on the inside is made up of.

The reason why Mercury in Virgo does this, this cutting open of dated opinion and assumed cohesion, is not because it aims to destroy. The reason why it does this is simply because it wants to know why things work the way they work.

“Why are all the people in this industry using this specific word?” “What does it really mean to cite this source instead of this other one?” “Why must we all hunch over and pretend that this thing is real when it apparently isn’t?”

There is a little self cruelty, usually, with Mercury in Virgo. It dissects the self, you see, with the same rigor that it dissects the not-self. Exalted planets are planets that strive to be better at a punishing pace. Mercury in Virgo simply cuts away all that is in excess, having little patience for stragglers, in its simple and pure quest to change the world.

You see, Mercury in Virgo is a Mercury that is painful to hold. It’s an acidic Mercury that eats away inside of you. It ensures that you are clean and it yells out when you attempt to temper it.

No one can ignore a Mercury in Virgo. Doing this is impossible. Mercury in Virgo isn’t often loud but its choice of words, its timing, and its precision makes it impossible to ignore. It’s not a very predictable Mercury but, even when you think that you know what Mercury in Virgo is about to say, its words slap you across the face with the impact of a surprise.

It’s funny. Mercury in Virgo is sometimes but not always celebrated for being good students the way the other domicile Mercury, Mercury in Gemini, is. These are the kids who were told that they were too smart when they were growing up. They’re the kids who were told to be lawyers when adults couldn’t win in an argument against them.

Mercury in Virgo doesn’t need to get along with you. They need the world to make a path for their startling intelligence.

Mercury in Virgo needs to write or to sing. There is too much zig zagging collision within this Mercury if it doesn’t have a channel. Mercury in Virgo is obsessive about its ability to transport a dancer or reader into its own internal world. It marvels at the satisfaction of laboring over paragraph after paragraph of text, undecipherable to most, until they arrive at the perfect question that begs for the perfect word that they don’t yet have. This is what Mercury in Virgo strives for when they practice their craft—not to truly succeed within old parameters but to create new paradigms.

When someone’s chart ruler is Mercury in Virgo, this is the other time that a planet can be angular, domicile, exalted, and rejoice. Mercury in Virgo is the only planet that is capable of satisfying all four of these conditions at once and it shows. When Mercury in Virgo is present in a chart, it seems to sap up almost everything else.

It’s not enough to simply say that Mercury in Virgo is smart and to be done with it. It’s the unsatisfied way that this intelligence, this need for knowledge, almost bludgers everything in its path because it acts as though it lives half starved for something that the world can’t provide it yet. Mercury in Virgo doesn’t just know possibility. It sees it. It can taste it with all of the senses. Possibility is as clear to Mercury in Virgo as the day is clear and it wonders why everyone else is upset about temporary clouds.

You see, as pessimistic as Mercury in Virgo behaves, deconstructing all of the things that we take for granted, in its nature lives a true optimist. The cynic is the only true optimist. The cynic is the one who believes that we are capable of being better. It believes that we are so capable that all we require, to be better, is the right instruction.

Oh, to be a Mercury in Virgo. You’re hope bundled in a thick layer of suspicion, armed with switchblades. Your ready tools up your arms are criticality, research, and dissuasion. You can do anything that you put your mind to and you know it too. Oh, to be Mercury in Virgo, to be able to do anything, and to have to choose your cause.